- Eora Country

Before white settlement, this was Eora country and the Aboriginal name for the bay has been recorded as “Yarana”. There is a question about whose country this was. Within 2 years of the arrival of the First Fleet, the Aboriginal population around Sydney harbour and along the coast was devastated, by shootings, starvation and introduced diseases and by competition for the land and marine resources. The diarists do not appear to have recorded the clans originally occupying the land between Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay. It was probably occupied by either the Bidjiagal, the Gameygal or the Cadigal Clan, and perhaps it was shared country?

On some accounts, it is the place where Governor Arthur Phillip on 10 July 1788 met with a group of between 200 to 300 aboriginals, while returning from the expedition to attempt to find the aboriginal suspected of killing two men cutting rushes on the Sydney harbour foreshore. With so many gathered together in one location, the suggestion was that some sort of ceremony or celebration was in progress.

With its ready access to fresh water and a small sheltered bay perhaps providing a seasonal harvest, Yarana may well have been a regular meeting place for all the clans of the Eora Nation. (Note: Recent research, largely based on the journal of John White, the Surgeon-General who was a member of the expedition, has suggested that this encounter was actually at Little Bay.)